A man doesn't begin to attain wisdom until he recognizes that he is no
longer indispensable.-Richard Byrd

Age does not bring wisdom. Often it merely changes simple stupidity into
arrogant conceit.-Robert A. Heinlein

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to
bruise than polish.-Anne Bradstreet

Back of every mistaken venture and defeat is the laughter of wisdom, if
you listen.-Carl Sandburg

But what is strength without a double shareOf wisdom?-John
Milton

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection which is
noblest; second, by imitation, which is the easiest; and third, by
experience, which is the bitterest.-Confucius

Cleverness is not wisdom.-Euripides

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.-Samuel
Taylor Coleridge

Consistently wise decisions can only be made by those whose wisdom is
constantly challenged.-Theodore (Ted) Sorensen

Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it.
Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self- imposed
blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt
us or disappoint us.-Stephen Colbert

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual
ignorance.-H.L. Mencken

Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?-Axel
Oxenstierna (1583-1654)

Doubt is the origin of wisdom.-René Descartes

Education makes us more stupid than the brutes. A thousand voices call
to us on every hand, but our ears are stopped with wisdom.-Jean
Giraudoux

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forgetfalls drop by drop upon
the heartuntil, in our own despair, against our will,comes
wisdom through the awful grace of God.-Aeschylus

Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes a day. Wisdom
consists of not exceeding the limit.-Elbert Hubbard

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of
cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.-Bertrand
Russell

Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. We
get very little wisdom from success, you know.-William Saroyan

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.
Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.-Edmund
Burke

Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.-Larry Niven

He is a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom.-Benjamin Franklin

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.-Thomas
Jefferson

I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what
is called the realities of life for dreams.-Hugh Walpole

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less
we use our power the greater it will be.-Thomas Jefferson

I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom.-Anatole
France

If our wisdom fails to match our science, we will have no second chance.
For there will be no one to carry our dreams across another Dark Age,
when the dust of all our cities incarnadines the sunsets of the world.-Arthur
C. Clarke

If youth is wasted on the young, wisdom is wasted on the old.
(attributed)-Alan Vanneman

Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom.-Anatole
France

It is astonishing what force, purity and wisdom it requires for a human
being to keep clear of falsehoods.-Margaret Fuller

It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of
wisdom to listen.-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be
reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.-Mohandas
K. Gandhi

It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the
audience is deaf.-Walter Lippmann

Ours is a world in which knowledge accumulates and wisdom decays.-Aldous
Huxley

Patience is the companion of wisdom.-Augustine of Hippo (St.
Augustine)

So when you pray, ask for wisdom and understanding. Don't bother asking
for anything else, because if you have wisdom and understanding you
don't need anything else.-Tommy Chong

Solomon made a great mistake when he asked for wisdom.-Anton
Chekhov

Strength and wisdom are not opposing values.-Bill Clinton

That is the great fallacy; the wisdom of old men. They do not grow wise.
They grow careful.-Ernest Hemingway

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes
the height of wisdom in another.-John Stuart Mill

The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom, but to
set a limit to infinite error.-Bertolt Brecht

The attempt to combine wisdom and power has only rarely been successful,
and then only for a short while.-Albert Einstein

The beginning of wisdom is the awareness that there is insufficient
evidence that a god or gods have created us and the recognition that we
are responsible in part for our own destiny. Human beings can achieve
this good life, but it is by the cultivation of the virtues of
intelligence and courage, not faith and obedience, that we will most
likely be able to do so.-Paul Kurtz

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of
events.-John Kenneth Galbraith

The essence of wisdom is to know when to be doing, and when it's useless
even to try.-Mary Stewart

The fact that your voice is amplified to the degree where it reaches
from one end of the country to the other does not confer upon you
greater wisdom or understanding than you possessed when your voice
reached only from one end of the bar to the other.-Edward R.
Murrow

The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom. The fear of God is the
death of wisdom. Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation,
and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.-Clarence Darrow

The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but
the achievement of serenity within and above it.-Reinhold Neibuhr

The first sigh of love is the last of wisdom.-Antoine Bret

The founding fathers, in their wisdom, devised a method by which our
republic can take one hundred of its most prominent numbskulls and keep
them out of the private sector where they might do actual harm.-P.J.
O'Rourke

The hope of the world is that wisdom can arrest conflict between
brothers. I believe that war is the deadly harvest of arrogant and
unreasoning minds.-Dwight D. Eisenhower

The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom no clock can
measure.-William Blake

The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience
for the benefit of the public.-Samuel Johnson

The most certain sign of Wisdom is a constant cheerfulness.-Michel
de Montaigne

The old- like children- talk to themselves, for they have reached that
hopeless wisdom of experience which knows that though one were to cry it
in the streets to multitudes, or whisper it in the kiss to one's
beloved, the only ears that can ever hear one's secret are one's own.-Eugene
O'Neill

The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age
brings wisdom.-H.L. Mencken

The possession of facts is knowledge, the use of them is wisdom.-Thomas
Jefferson

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge
faster than society gathers wisdom.-Isaac Asimov

The saddest words of pen or tongue are wisdom's wasted on the young.-James
Thurber

The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good
grace in changing circumstances.-Robert Louis Stevenson

The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.-Lin
Yutang

The wisdom of the masses is not always... wise.-Jon Stewart

The wisdom of winter is madness in May.-Donald Swann

There are compensations for growing older. One is the realization that
to be sporting isn't at all necessary. It is a great relief to reach
this stage of wisdom.-Cornelia Otis Skinner

There are more quarrels smothered by just shutting your mouth, and
holding it shut, than by all the wisdom in the world.-Henry Ward
Beecher

There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right
and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.-Jack
London

There are two statements about human beings that are true: that all
human beings are alike, and that all are different. On these two facts
all human wisdom is founded.-Mark Van Doren

There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always
been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight.-Norman
Cousins

There is a time to battle against Nature, and a time to obey her. True
wisdom lies in making the right choice.-Arthur C. Clarke

There is a wisdom of the Head, and... there is a wisdom of the Heart.-Charles
Dickens

There is something even more valuable to civilization than wisdom, and
that is character.-H.L. Mencken

There is wisdom in madness and strong probability of truth in all
accusations, for people are complete and everybody is capable of
everything.-Joseph Heller

To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must
observe.-Marilyn vos Savant

To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.-Evelyn
Waugh

To know how to grow old is the master-work of wisdom, and one of the
most difficult chapters in the great art of living.-Henri
Frédéric Amiel

To the fool, he who speaks wisdom will sound foolish.-Euripides

Understanding is knowing what to do; wisdom is knowing what to do next;
virtue is actually doing it.-Tristan Gylberd

We can know only that we know nothing. And that is the highest degree of
human wisdom.-Leo Tolstoy

We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a
journey that no one can take for us or spare us.-Marcel Proust

We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who
understands the wise is wise already.-G.C. Lichtenberg

We must abandon the prevalent belief in the superior wisdom of the
ignorant.-Daniel J. Boorstin

We must expect reverses, even defeats. They are sent to teach us wisdom
and prudence, to call forth greater energies, and to prevent our falling
into greater disasters.-Robert E. Lee

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the
United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not
violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward
one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer
within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.-Robert
F. Kennedy

Where is the Life we have lost in living?Where is the wisdom we have
lost in knowledge?Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?The
cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries.-T.S. Eliot

Whether a young man shall reap pleasure or pain from winning the objects
of his choice, depends, not only upon his wisdom or folly in selecting
those objects, but upon the right or wrong methods by which he pursues
them.-Horace Mann

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave
to laugh, and too self-ful to seek other than itself.-Kahlil
Gibran

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.-George Santayana

Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.-Norman
Cousins

Wisdom doesn't necessarily come with age. Sometimes age just shows up
all by itself.-Tom Wilson

Wisdom is essential in a president, the appearance of wisdom will do in
a candidate.-Eric Sevareid

Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to
acquire it.-Albert Einstein

Wisdom is oft-times nearer when we stoopThan when we soar.-William
Wordsworth

Wisdom is the power to put our time and our knowledge to the proper use.-Thomas
J. Watson

Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where
you need it.-Doug Larson

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you'd have
preferred to talk.-Doug Larson

Wisdom is the strength of the weak.-Joseph Joubert

Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely
because it comes late.-Felix Frankfurter

Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail
conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.-John Maynard
Keynes